The first breath was fire.
It clawed through my lungs as I doubled over, hands pressed to the mark searing beneath my ribs. The voice that had spoken in the silence was gone, but its command lingered, etched into me like scripture: surrender.
I tried to scream but no sound left my throat. The glyph flared hotter, lines of burning red racing across my skin, curling like serpents around my arms, my neck, my heart. It wasn't a wound anymore. It was a language. My body was being written into something ancient, each pulse of agony another line of a hymn I could not stop.
The temple shook with the aftershock of the rift. Shadows licked the broken stone like fire, but there was no Damon, no roar, no tether to hold me steady. Only the Wraith Knight's hollow frame, its gaze locked upon me, as if I had been the sacrifice it had been waiting for all along.
I fell to my knees again, fingernails clawing the stone. My vision fractured—ash-choked halls rose in place of the temple, faceless psalmists whispering my name. In their midst stood a figure vast and skeletal, wings dragging like broken banners, a dragon's silhouette made of smoke and bone.
Its voice slithered through the hallucination, echoing inside the burn of my brand.
Bride. Last Bride. Shadowblood's end and Shadowblood's beginning.
I curled forward, choking on ash that wasn't there, breath stolen by pain that was far too real. Somewhere in the haze, I thought I heard Damon's roar, distant, impossible, already fading.
And then the mark beneath my skin answered the whispers, pulsing once, twice—until the stone floor cracked open with the force of its light.
---
The Wraith Knight did not advance, but neither did it retreat. It lingered at the edge of the circle of cold light, its broken armor groaning with a sound like bone grinding against stone. Every movement of that husk radiated menace, as if it could lunge at me the instant I faltered.
My pulse hammered as I forced myself upright, the weight of the brand beneath my skin dragging at me. Every breath I took came shallow, a knife of frost slicing down my lungs. The iron stink of blood clung to the air—mine, the beast's, I couldn't tell anymore.
The knight's helm tilted. Hollow sockets fixed on me with a dreadful patience, like it was waiting for me to break apart on my own. It didn't need to rush. My own body was betraying me. The sigil seared into my flesh had begun to throb in a rhythm that wasn't my own heartbeat. A second pulse. A foreign one.
I stumbled a step back, but the stones beneath me seemed to shift, slick with ash that wasn't there before. Shadows moved differently around me now, twitching in unnatural angles, as though bending toward the glow of the mark. My skin crawled.
Damon's oath… my bond to him… it was more than blood, more than words. The brand was alive, and the Wraith Knight could feel it. Its blade slowly lowered, not in mercy, but in recognition. Like it saw not Dahlia Moon standing here, but something else clawing its way out of me.
My stomach churned, panic tearing at me, yet I couldn't look away. The edges of my vision swam, hallucinations licking at the corners like flame. But the danger remained immediate—the Knight was still there, weapon drawn, patient as death itself.
---
The earth tilts beneath me, and suddenly the world blurs. The Knight's steel edges drip backward into the dark, its figure unraveling into smoke, yet its presence presses against me still—like a blade hovering just out of sight. My breath hitches. My body jerks, but my vision is no longer here. I am being dragged somewhere else.
The air thickens, sticky, sweet with the scent of ash roses. The battlefield vanishes into a kaleidoscope of pale moonlight and ruined halls. I know this place—I don't. Columns, broken and bent, lean like giants in mourning. The floor is made of glass that ripples with every step I take, though I haven't moved. Something is leading me.
A voice murmurs inside the static of my skull. My name, fractured, elongated, spoken as if underwater. Dahlia. Dahlia. The syllables pulse like a heartbeat against my temples.
I raise my hand, or think I do, and a strange mark shivers beneath my skin—no, beneath something deeper, like it was carved before I was born. My veins glow faintly, threads of white fire wrapping my wrist, climbing higher. I hear the Knight still, breathing in the edges of my vision, yet it does not strike. It only waits. It only watches.
Then the shadows split. Faces peer from them—some familiar, some impossible. Damon's eyes flare in the dark, but twisted, colder, not his eyes at all. Sareth's voice echoes like a hymn bent wrong. The estate, the chapel, they flash before me like shards of broken glass. I stagger though I have no legs here.
I whisper aloud, though my throat feels stitched, Who's doing this?
The answer does not come. Instead, the sound of a choir—low, droning, unbearable—rises from the glass below my feet. The song digs claws into my mind, and with each note the mark burns brighter, forcing me to clutch at my chest as though to keep myself from splitting in two.
The Knight's silhouette stirs faintly in the corner of my sight. Still waiting. Still watching.
---
The floor tilted under me as if Valemont itself exhaled, loosening its bones. My hands clawed at nothing, reaching for walls that seemed to recede, stretched too far to touch. Shadows lengthened like spilled ink, bending at wrong angles, refusing to obey the torches still burning behind me.
A whisper grazed my ear—not from the Knight, not from Damon, but from inside me. My own voice, low, guttural, saying things I couldn't catch. I stumbled forward, breath snagging in my throat, chasing the sound as though it carried my soul away with it.
The air thickened into veils. Faces flickered inside them. Not strangers—reflections. My eyes, my lips, my mouth smeared with ash and teeth. Each face shifted, some laughing, some bleeding, some wide-eyed with hunger. The sight struck me harder than any blade the Wraith Knight could swing.
I pressed my palm against my skin, nails biting into flesh, desperate to feel where I ended and the mirage began. But even the pressure didn't hold me. My body was porous, bleeding memory into the dark.
A jolt of silver light cut across the haze—the faint outline of Damon's sigil, burning faintly from the brand he had sworn over me. It should have steadied me. Instead, it warped. The mark flared, but not in his hand—in mine. For an instant, I saw it seared beneath my skin, alive, writhing like a second pulse.
My knees hit stone. My scream came out soundless.
The ground around me breathed, cracks opening into pale mouths filled with whispering teeth. They spoke in a tongue I knew without knowing, each syllable a knife dragging through marrow.
Run.
Kneel.
Yield.
I tried to lift my head, to remember Damon's voice, his vow, his hands steady on mine. But the more I reached for him, the less I found. All I heard was the Knight's armor grinding in the dark—closer now, circling like a predator waiting for me to break fully into its reach.
I didn't know if I was standing anymore. I didn't know if the stone was beneath me, or if I had already fallen through.
---
The cold seeped deeper into my veins, as if the stone beneath me were drinking me dry. Every breath rasped like it belonged to someone else, someone already buried. I reached for the rune wall to steady myself, but the carvings writhed and slithered under my palm—serpents made of ash, whispering in tongues I almost understood.
A voice rose from the cracks. Not a single voice but a chorus of whispers, each one sharp enough to draw blood across my mind. They spoke my name wrong, stretching it, breaking it, reshaping it into something I didn't recognize. I staggered back, but the shadows followed, their mouths opening wide in a hungry black grin.
My chest heaved. I told myself it wasn't real, that the fortress walls weren't bending, that the faces pressing out of the stone weren't my own. But my hands trembled against my will, and the sickening certainty took root: this place wasn't just showing me illusions—it was remaking me.
The air thickened until it clawed at my lungs. I tried to scream, but the sound stuck, broken in my throat. The flicker of firelight on the walls wasn't flame anymore—it was memory, bleeding loose, my mother's face caught between agony and rage, her eyes hollowed out into mirrors.
I turned and nearly fell. The hall stretched wrong, longer than it should be, every step pulling me farther from the world I knew. At the far end, the Wraith Knight lingered, unmoving, its sword planted in the ground, its helm tilted as if it were listening to my unraveling. Not chasing, not striking—just waiting.
That was worse.
I pressed my nails into my palms until I tasted iron, desperate to anchor myself in pain, but the whispers only grew louder, like they were fed by my blood.
Something inside me buckled.
The runes along the wall flared in answer, burning bright then dripping like molten wax, and for an instant I swore they carved themselves into my skin, branding me in shapes too old and too cruel to name.
---
The air ripped apart with whispers—no, not whispers, screams folded inside themselves until they shattered like glass in my skull. The ash beneath my boots writhed, reshaping into hands that clawed for my ankles. The Wraith Knight lingered at the edges of sight, its burning eyes a patient verdict, waiting for me to stumble, to collapse, to be consumed.
The ground tilted. Or was it my body that broke sideways? Shadows pulled long, unfurling mouths filled with teeth made from my own memories. My mother's lullaby stretched into a dirge. Sareth's warnings, and the Psalmists hollow hymn—bled across the inside of my skin as if I had been written into their madness.
I screamed—or thought I did—but the sound came back wrong, twisted, someone else's voice spilling from my throat. A child's. A corpse's. A stranger I'd never been but somehow remembered. The hallucination split and spliced reality until I could no longer tell where my flesh ended and the void began.
And then—fire. A searing brand beneath my skin, spiraling upward, veins of molten agony bursting across my chest. The mark throbbed with its own heartbeat, out of rhythm with mine. I clawed at myself, desperate to rip it out, but the more I tore, the deeper the pain burrowed.
The Wraith Knight stepped forward at last, deliberate, inevitable, its blade dragging through the dirt with a shriek that made the sky tremble. My knees buckled. My vision fractured into shards. All I could see was the arc of steel rising, the strike about to fall, my body ready to splinter open.
And in that final instant, when terror swallowed me whole—I felt him. Damon's presence crashed through the maelstrom like iron forged into light. Not seen. Not yet. But felt—burning through the madness, through the rot, his name threading itself against the howling voices like an oath unbreakable.
I reached for him in the dark—fingers trembling, mind splintering—and the hallucination bent, but did not break.
The Knight's blade descended.
And everything went black.
---
Dahlia is teetering on the edge of madness, the Wraith Knight's blade a heartbeat away from ending her. Damon's presence has flickered back into her senses—but is it too late to anchor her? Or is she about to be swallowed by the mark beneath her skin?
👉 Keep reading to see if Dahlia survives the breaking point—or if the shadows claim her before Damon can reach her.
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